How Do You Get in Touch With the Leadership of a Country at War?

Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine."

“I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of history were shifting, now they're just erupting, crashing. This is the asteroid-impact event for this part of the world with effects that will last similarly long going forward.”

Show notes:

• @yaffaesque
• joshuayaffa.com
• Yaffa on Longform
• Longform Podcast #379: Joshua Yaffa
• Yaffa's New Yorker archive
• 03:00 "On the Road With Ukraine's Refugees" (Sabrina Tavernise • The Daily • Mar 2022)
• 7:00 "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine" (New Yorker • Mar 2022)
• 12:00 "Ukraine's Unlikely New President, Promising a New Style of Politics, Gets a Taste of Trump's Swamp" (New Yorker • Oct 2019)
• 33:00 "In the Rubble of Kharkiv, Survivors Make Their Stand: ‘It’s a War, and It’s a Dirty War’" (Yaroslav Trofimov • Wall Street Journal • Mar 2022)
• 33:00 "A Russian airstrike kills 9 civilians in Mykolaiv" (Michael Schwirtz • New York Times • Mar 2022)

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